what will OS X bring us?
I've posted this question before but I think the time is right now that Jagwire is upon us to ask it again.
Bearing in mind that I know nothing about Unix at all.
1) what will X allow that has never been done before?
2) what will X allow you to do that no other OS can offer?
X is still not the finished article yet but is apparently getting closer. I must say I'm disappointed at the continually rising specs required to get decent performance out of it according many of the posts here. I've also heard a lot about inkwell et al but nothing really concrete.
Years ago a Unix tech-head friend of mine said something about Unix being able to pipe stuff. I confess to not really following (we were very drunk at the time
) but from what I can understand it seems to be something to do with the output from one command being fed immediately as the input from another.
Would this kind of scenario be possible:
Imagine being in FCP or After Effects etc and working on a movie. You need to composite a scene from Maya/Lightwave/C4D etc with real footage. Imagine having them both open and running. In FCP you'd pointer to the 3D graphics. As you work in Maya/Lightwave/C4D adjusting the scene the footage in FCP updates immediately as you scrub. You could adjust the lighting in the 3D software and see the results against your footage in FCP immediately. Or perhaps if you altered angles in After Effects Maya would then update. When you got what you wanted you asked FCp to render and when it came to the 3D footage FCP called Maya's renderer to do ist stuff live.
or should I get my coat?
Bearing in mind that I know nothing about Unix at all.
1) what will X allow that has never been done before?
2) what will X allow you to do that no other OS can offer?
X is still not the finished article yet but is apparently getting closer. I must say I'm disappointed at the continually rising specs required to get decent performance out of it according many of the posts here. I've also heard a lot about inkwell et al but nothing really concrete.
Years ago a Unix tech-head friend of mine said something about Unix being able to pipe stuff. I confess to not really following (we were very drunk at the time
) but from what I can understand it seems to be something to do with the output from one command being fed immediately as the input from another.Would this kind of scenario be possible:
Imagine being in FCP or After Effects etc and working on a movie. You need to composite a scene from Maya/Lightwave/C4D etc with real footage. Imagine having them both open and running. In FCP you'd pointer to the 3D graphics. As you work in Maya/Lightwave/C4D adjusting the scene the footage in FCP updates immediately as you scrub. You could adjust the lighting in the 3D software and see the results against your footage in FCP immediately. Or perhaps if you altered angles in After Effects Maya would then update. When you got what you wanted you asked FCp to render and when it came to the 3D footage FCP called Maya's renderer to do ist stuff live.
or should I get my coat?
Comments
<strong>I must say I'm disappointed at the continually rising specs required to get decent performance out of it according many of the posts here.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Eh? Every update has been making X faster and faster...not the other way around (maybe you're confusing it with Windows?
<img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" />
<strong>I must say I'm disappointed at the continually rising specs required to get decent performance out of it according many of the posts here. </strong><hr></blockquote>
Q: How does Apple afford to pay programmers to write code?
A: Hardware sales......
D
Ive been meaning to learn this stuff for too lomg now, but AS seem like a really powerful tool in the OS which Ive been ignoring <img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" /> .
Ive read that there is more and more integration brwn the CLI and AppleScript.
Anyone w/AS knowledge want to chime in? Iwas going to say pipe-up, but thought better of it.
<strong>
. . . Imagine being in FCP or After Effects etc and working on a movie. You need to composite a scene from Maya/Lightwave/C4D etc with real footage. Imagine having them both open and running. In FCP you'd pointer to the 3D graphics. As you work in Maya/Lightwave/C4D adjusting the scene the footage in FCP updates immediately as you scrub. You could adjust the lighting in the 3D software and see the results against your footage in FCP immediately. Or perhaps if you altered angles in After Effects Maya would then update. When you got what you wanted you asked FCp to render and when it came to the 3D footage FCP called Maya's renderer to do ist stuff live.
or should I get my coat?
As Keda said, you should be able to something like this with AppleScript. Though a better description is "might be able to" IF all of the software you want to integrate is AppleScriptable. I think that you could do it with Java and possibly Pearl, sending Apple Events to the various programs as well in OS X, though since I'm not using OS X yet I cant attest to it.
You can use Applescripts to control remote machines, too. You can have Applescripts do nearly anything you'd want them to do. It's really quite powerful and extensive. You name it, you can probably do it with an Applescript. I have one running at home now that runs at login - I have it send the shell that line that puts your screensaver on the desktop. It doesn't have to open the Terminal app, it sends the command directly to the shell. So when I log in, that Applescript runs, and my desktop turns into Marine Aquarium.
but I've used Applescripts for plenty of other things too... for example did you know Netscape Communicator 4.7 has code for a kiosk mode built in, but without an interface? I didn't know either until I pulled up Netscape's Applescript dictionary in the script editor, and there it was. So i wrote a script that put Netscape into Kiosk mode (full screen, no toobars, no buttons) and then fleshed out the script to handle various things like if somebody clicked out of the browser, or if somebody went to a different URL... I had the script monitor it and the script would reset the browser to the default home page and put it front and center if anybody changed it. It also put up a warning page for 5 seconds asking the user not to do that. If that warning page went up three ties, then it would put up another page saying the Mac was going to restart... and it did. Then on reboot the script would launch Netscape in Kiosk mode again.
Applscript is ridiculously powerful. You could control your entire interface with Applescript if you wanted to.
<strong>an operating system built by a phone company</strong><hr></blockquote>
Unix was originally built by AT&T, yes. The thing to realize here is that phone companies require unprecendented reliability. When was the last time you picked up a phone and there was no dial tone? Compare that to the last time the Internet wasn't working for you. The uptime standard in the phone industry is 99.99999% That allows for 10 minutes of downtime per YEAR. So when AT&T designed Unix, they required an OS controlling their phone systems with THAT kind of stability. The phone industry is often not thought of as all the technology behind it because that technology is so transparent. If Microsoft built their OS requiring an overall uptime of 99.99999%, things would be a whole other ball game. However, quality and consistancy of service are continually overlooked in the world of computing / Internet. Neither of these were overlooked in the design of Unix by AT&T. AT&T had many, many great minds working for it. Bell labs developed some amazing stuff. I have a tremendous amount of respect for those developing the world of Telecom / PSTN. That stuff just does not break.
<strong>Back to Apple Script. It's very powerful. With one well programmed script you can take down a school server with it. Oh boy, I said to much.
Now you be a good boy Altivec_2.0 <img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" />
Is it because most Mac users don't have a natural urge to screw other Mac users? Or, is there a safety mechanism built in?
Not that I'm missing them, but it seems like an excellent opportunity fo a malicious coder.
<strong>I
2) what will X allow you to do that no other OS can offer?
</strong>
<hr></blockquote>
UNIX plus Microsoft Office on the same machine
without rebooting.
[quote]
<strong>
Years ago a Unix tech-head friend of mine said something about Unix being able to pipe stuff. I confess to not really following (we were very drunk at the time
</strong><hr></blockquote>
In UNIX piping is a command line thing. For example
if you do `ls' at the command line you get a list
of all the files in the directory you are in. If you
do `grep .pdf fred' you get a list of all the lines in the file fred which contain `.pdf'. So if you do `ls | grep .pdf '
you get a list of all the files in the current directory with .pdf in the filenames.
Michael